Category Archives: Dreams

A small society of mushroom farmers lived deep in the underground. The only light came from their torches. They were simple, peaceful folk, who needed only mushrooms and laughter to survive and thrive. None of them had ever left their underground home. I am not sure any of them would have known how. But they were in trouble. There was about to be an eruption of lava into their cave home, and if they did not escape right away, they would all die. I was the only person who knew about the impending lava doom. But, having materialized from what must have seemed to them to be another world (and which perhaps was), it took a bit of time to convince them of their danger, and that it was important they evacuate immediately.

But I did convince them to follow me, and I led all of them up a series of ladders and staircases. There must have been almost a hundred of them living there, and making sure they all kept climbing was a chore. As they followed me up, we could hear the lava destroying their former home as it filled the rooms. But I knew it would continue rising and destroying any living thing in its path. So we had to keep moving on. We climbed up ladder after ladder, staircase after staircase, through rocky underground rooms, magma fumes burning right behind us all the time.

After a very long climb, we were finally able to get far ahead of the lava, which was continuing to rise beneath us. We came to a standstill in what seemed to be the very last underground room. We could not find the way out of this room, but we knew we were close to the surface of the Earth because there were thin beams of light struggling to shine through vine covered windows on either side of the room. Since we had some time to think before the red hot lava consumed us all, we took in the room: it was gigantic; at least a thousand feet long and half as wide. There were hundreds of desks on the floor in what may once have been organized rows. There was a large desk at the far end of the room. It was a classroom. It had been a classroom a long time ago, at any rate. The desks were covered in moss, and vines and ivy hung from the walls. Whatever was taught in this classroom was long ago forgotten.

Our plan at this point was to stand on the desks and make our last stand against the oncoming magma flow as best we could. Suddenly, the entire room filled with tiny multi-colored beads that seemed to come from no where. They came in either black, white, red, yellow or blue, they were roundish and about three millimeters in diameter. They became attracted to various objects in the room, as if they were magnets. As they attached themselves to the objects, they appeared to become self-aware. It was as if they learned from the objects wordlessly. Once they had done this, they attached themselves to each other, apparently eager to communicate with their own kind about their newfound consciousness. As they did so, they formed spheres of beads. In each sphere of beads, all of the myriad of colored beads became the average of the colors in the group. For instance, a sphere made up of just black and white beads became grey, and a sphere made up of blue and red beads became purple, and a sphere made up of blue and red and a few white and black beads became some sort of a mauve. This happened over and over again, until the entire room was filled with inch and a half diameter spheres of thousands of different colors. I had almost forgotten about the lava when it started to enter the room.

This was it. We moved all the children to the back. I suppose we thought they should live a minute longer than everyone else, but now that I look back on it, it wouldn’t make much difference. The elders stood in front just waiting to die. But the lava, instead of filling room, was consumed by the bead-spheres. As the spheres took in the lava, they formed giant bubbles made up of many spheres, which got larger and larger as the lava flowed in. Some of the people accidentally were touched by lava, but rather than die, they expanded like the bead-sphere-bubbles. I was afraid they would explode. But eventually the lava stopped flowing, the expanded people returned to normal, and the beads fell to the floor, finished with what I suppose was their work. We were alive. All of us had survived and we had the beads to thank.

After we cleaned up the former classroom, we built a tiny city in its place. This would be the new home of the mushroom farmers. Their aspirations had changed. I could see in their eyes that they wanted to connect with the world in a different way. They wanted to understand things they had not even considered before. They had seen more in one day than they had seen in their entire lives up to that point. From now on, their lives would be not just about mushrooms, but about the search for meaning and truth in the universe. It was then that someone discovered an opening to the outside world. We went through the opening.

We all stood atop a mile-high grass-covered tower of rock admiring the view. In one direction, a sparkling blue sea reflected the sun and the sky. In another direction, the land: grass, forest and swamp gathered together like old friends. The clouds were large and fluffy and looked as though they would taste like flowers, if, somehow, one could eat them. Miles away, there was another tower, much like ours (I say “ours” because I had become one of them). The other tower also contained within it a society. We could tell, because they had put buildings and an air terminal on the top of their tower. They had massive airships for traveling to places we had probably not even dreamed of. We made a mental note that we should try to communicate with them in the future.

I awoke in the past. I knew that I was somewhere in the 20’s or 30’s, but could not be exactly sure, as the temporal positioning unit on the time transporter was not 100% accurate. I arrived in the grassy backyard of a large Victorian mansion somewhere in the Eastern half of the U.S. The house was on a North/South street, with the backyard on the Western side. The perimeter of the property was lined with a white picket fence. The Northern edge of the backyard had a steep slope that was covered in shrubs and had a lot of trees. In fact, there were enough trees to shade most of the yard.

There were a lot of cats. Some had almost human faces, hairless, but dark grey and leathery, with very wide mouths, the rest of their bodies covered in regular cat fur. Some had faces catlike faces, but wore clothing. All of them were the size of baby bears.

There, in the backyard, I met a group of animal rights activists. They too had traveled back in time. Their sole purpose in this time was to help the oppressed cat-people by getting people to vote for pro-cat legislation. Presumably, the failure of the cat movement had caused such negative repercussions for the future that for the future to be repaired required fixing the problem in a different time. I did not quite understand why they couldn’t have stayed in their own time and fought the problem there. It would be far less costly. Perhaps there were no cat people left in the future. Anyway, at the time, I did not seem to really even think about it enough to ask any questions.

What I did want to know was how time travel worked. And what was the meaning behind it? And I wanted to continue to travel to other times, and learn and grow that way. I was just excited to be doing it in the first place. I had, in this very short space of time, fallen in love with the leader of the animal rights organization (not that what she looks like matters, but it might be important for you people reading this that she looked very much like Zoe from Firefly). She was not interested in coming with me to other times. She wanted to stay where she was and help the cat-people, and she wanted me to stay with her (she evidently had also fallen in love with me).

I did not stay asleep long enough to see the outcome of that situation.

It was a sunny day on an island somewhere. Two men had climbed to the top of a mountain, which was covered in various kinds of plants. They were looking for something. They were looking for holes. The mountain represented an apartment, and the three monsters they eventually found on top of the mountain represented the holes for which they were looking. They brought the monsters down the plant-infested slope of the mountain to the beach below. Once out of the plants and into the sands, the two men and the three monsters and I stood around looking at each other. The monsters were celebrating being found. One of them, a 7-foot-tall humanoid tree with a stump for a head, wanted to give me a high-five. We tried once, and missed. We tried again and missed again, and he was getting slightly annoyed. We tried a third time and made contact, only it was fairly weak, because we hadn’t made full contact. At that point we gave up. I was embarrassed, and the tree-person was visibly less celebratory after that. This is all I can remember.

1. I was doing a performance with a band. The last song of the set required a backing track, but the backing track didn’t just contain sounds that the band couldn’t do, it contained drums, bass, vocals, stage banter, and audience applause. The only thing it didn’t have was the rhythm guitar, which I attempted to play, but it was the first time I had heard the song in years, so I didn’t do it perfectly. The song at points sounded like YYZ by Rush.

2. After the performance, I was selling my new album, “Sweet Edith Manton.” One guy from the audience expressed particular interest in the album, so I went to my merchandise area to get one for him, but there weren’t any there. So I went out to my car to get one, but it took me forever to find one. By the time I came back, he was gone. However, a former co-worker happened to have materialized there and bought one instead. The performance had taken place in what appeared to be a run-down community center, or perhaps an Eagle’s Lodge, or something like it.

3. I stayed in a rich man’s house. He had something special to show me. A package had arrived in the mail, addressed to him, and it was sitting in his den. It was about 9 feet tall, and just as wide and deep. Once he removed the cardboard covering, it was revealed to be a giant glass hexagonal prism, with the hexagonal faces on the top and bottom. It was divided into two main compartments: the top one about 7 feet tall, and the bottom one about 2 feet tall. First, he showed us the bottom compartment. The bottom compartment itself was divided into a half dozen smaller compartments, each completely filled with dead, winged insects. Each compartment had different species. Some were bees, others flies, others wasps. They weren’t all dead, actually. A few flies had survived the journey and were still flying around. The man opened up a door on the front of the insect section of the glass hexagonal prism, to show me up close his new insect collection, but I stayed back and admired from the other side of the room. I was not very interested in getting close to the dead insects. Once that was over, we moved our attention to the top compartment, which was much more interesting. In it was a young man in a chair. He was alive, and seemed perfectly healthy and happy. This was his studio apartment. But instead of the normal things that people keep in their apartments, like sinks and toilets and beds, he only had this chair. But the legs of his chair were resting on the green grass of a river bank. And the river “ran” from one side of the glass prism to the other. It was a tiny river, for the other river bank was at the opposite edge of the room. Around him were trees, presumably the edge of a forest. Also there were a few bushes and rocks and various other things that make up that sort of nature scene. I didn’t get the impression that the rich man owned the man in the glass prism. In fact, I had the feeling (and in the case of this dream, any feeling is the truth) that the man in the prism was himself very rich, and he spent a lot of money creating this biodome for himself. I assumed the rich man who owned the house paid the man in the prism to put himself on display and they were both benefiting from the deal.

The first is a dream I had while lying on the floor of the van sleeping on the road in Kansas: I was lying on the floor of the van sleeping, but my eyes were open and my body was paralyzed. The cymbal bag and bass amplifier were about to fall out of the side of the car, and I was powerless to stop them, on account of my being paralyzed. With all my strength, I tried to make myself say the words “stop the car” over and over again, to no avail. The words would not come out. So instead, I jerked my neck back and forth about fifty times until I finally woke up to find that we were actually in no danger of dropping equipment on the road. I have these kinds of dreams at least 50 percent of the time I sleep with lights on (or outside in the daytime).

I fell asleep again and had this dream: Brandon, the show’s keyboardist, was driving the car (as he was in real life), and we came upon a major sandstorm and “brown-out” conditions. All the traffic had backed up to wait out the storm, but we were plowing ahead and paying no attention to the stopped cars. I woke up before anything happened.

The torn-up rim and the spare tire. The amp broke.

The second thing that happened was the following thing: The RV had overtaken the van by at least 20 miles (that was the range of our walkie-talkies), so we were not behind them like we usually are. During this time apart, the right tire of the equipment trailer started disintegrating. The force of the rubber flapping around at 70 mph dented the metal wheel well, and presumably ripped it off and sent it flying into a ditch. Since there are already so many noises happening in the RV (like jars of peanut butter falling over, and beds shaking), no one in the RV noticed the sound of the right rim on the trailer scraping on the ground. 8 miles later, when they finally realized something was amiss, the rim was about 2 inches less in radius and completely unusable. We got a mechanic to come out and help us put on the spare. Then he took it to his shop where he had to pull the tufts of steel reinforcing wire from the axle that it had wrapped around hundreds of times (good sentence, huh?). Then, it turned out that we needed a replacement part. This part was so rare, that he had to drive, boat and balloon many miles all the way to the Far East to find it, and the store that had it only had one in stock, on a bed of straw inside a small wicker basket, stored between a mogwai and an ancient oil lamp in the back of a damp basement. Also the store was minutes away from closing for the day. If he had not gotten that part, we would have had to cancel our show that night. As it happens, we did the show, and it was fantastic. A million people showed up to this club and were super enthusiastic and supportive. The club was in Colorado Springs and was called the Triple Nickel. The people there were awesome and we did a great show. Of course, all this shaking and the dust that was generated from the trailer problem had ruined the guitar amp. So half-way through the set, the guitar amp started to malfunction. Nevertheless, we played through it and gave the audience a show they won’t soon forget…although I’m pretty sure a few of them will forget everything they did that night, but I won’t hold that against them.

Stay tuned for two blogs: one about the previous night in Kansas City, and one about the next night in Denver.

I was on tour in an unnamed state. I had just driven my motor scooter, loaded with equipment, to the desert dunes. I was exploring the steep sandy slopes on foot. The sun shone inadequately through a haze of clouds. A show was canceled, so I spent my day walking along the ridges, admiring the landscape.

Luckily, I had another show scheduled the next evening. The performance was to be at a sort of coffee / ice cream shop. When I arrived, however, the place was closed for the day and yet another show was canceled. In spite of it being closed, there were about 60 people loitering outside, goofing off and having fun. Even though they weren’t expecting a performance (none of them knew who I was), I thought maybe I could just put on a show anyway. I found out that the door to the place was unlocked, and it would be extremely simple to go in and power up the PA system and put on a show for these people who looked so much like they would enjoy a show. But, of course, I’m not the type of person to do that without asking the owner of the equipment. So I spent the rest of the night trying to contact the owner, and never getting through. The people started to disperse, and it became obvious that I would not be able to pull this off.

Then I realized that I had left my saxophone in the previous town. So, after a long nap in a stranger’s house, I set off for the other town to get my saxophone.

This dream happened a couple of nights after an actual show in Glendale, CA was canceled.

1. I spilled pumpkin soup all over a bunch of folded clothing that was sitting on a curb next to a van (that also got hit with pumpkin soup). Rather than clean it up, I left it there, with the van door open.

2. I had moved to a different house. I was missing all my t-shirts, but had a full selection of blouses, none of which fit me (in my head, I kept asking myself “why did I buy a blouse that didn’t fit me?”).

3. I went back to the van to close the door and clean up the mess, and see if any of that stuff on the curb was my t-shirts. An old friend I haven’t seen in years was there, and I can’t remember exactly what we talked about or what she was doing, but I remember getting the feeling that she was doing way better at her career than I was at mine…. See More

4. A couple of old friends of mine were at my new house (the one from a couple dreams ago). Another person, whom I couldn’t see, came up behind me and gave me the worst wedgie ever…he lifted me all the way up to the ceiling, and it was very painful in ways I don’t want to share publicly. He put me down and ran away before I could figure out who it was. I got my bearings and ran off to try to find him. I went down the hall, turned a corner, and I was in a sort of pub/bar/tgifriday’s type place. Some other friends of mine were there, at a table, standing up, and I explained that “I’m looking for the person who gave me the wedgie. When I find him, I’m going to punch him in the –” I stopped myself, because I looked around and there were families seated at the booths, and I didn’t want to offend them.

In between these dreams, I had fits of sleep paralysis, during which I completely misinterpreted the world around me. Some light reflecting off a plastic container on my shelf, looked to me exactly like an alarm clock going off…and i heard an alarm clock sound, too. Of course, I couldn’t move to do anything about it, but I figured out what was happening, and rather than fight it, like I usually do, I tried to go back into a regular dream. Another time, I was convinced there was someone in the room watching me and laughing at me.